


good riddance

by sweetlyblue (softlyblue)



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - All Media Types, Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, The Problem of Susan, the ending of the last battle annoyed me so much. im so annoyed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-23 00:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18538648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/softlyblue/pseuds/sweetlyblue
Summary: It makes such a merry sight, as to make an old woman's heart warm. The carved lion's face cracks and blackens, and she tells it good riddance, and she means it with all the strength she's ever had.





	good riddance

**Author's Note:**

> susan pevensie! deserves the world! let girls like feminine things without taking away their access to heaven! thank u neil gaiman for pointing out the Problem

For the first time in a long while, the Pevensie children are separated beyond school. Lucy and Edmund go to stay with their cousins, the Scrubbs, and that odious little child Eustace, and Susan honestly can't be jealous of them. At least they get to stay together.

Peter's studying for his exams, hoping to get out of Oxford with a first in History (specialising in medieval warfare) and so he's gone to stay the summer with Professor Kirke, in his small cottage. Susan can't really begrudge him it. Peter's dedicated to the subject, more than anyone ever thought he'd be dedicated to anything, and he's told Susan with a wink and a nod that he might stay on at Oxford another few years. He's digging a Peter-sized hole for himself among the books, approaching them like an attacking army.

So Susan goes to America with her parents. After all, she'll get the most out of it.

She sees resentment in the younger pair's eyes, following the family off the boat, and she can't blame them for that, either. When she goes to the bathroom to brush gloss over her lips and trap the tears from her eyelashes, her hand doesn't shake at all.

In America, she loses her virginity for the second time.

(In Narnia, it had been to a visiting Prince from the countries far to the South, his skin dark and his smile wide and his eyes beautifully brown. They stayed up half the night, watching the stars, and then he had brushed her hair - it was long, when she was old, past her thighs - away from her neck, and kissed the skin there. His hands were cold and refreshing, and she took him to her bed, and when he left he pressed his lips to her hand and promised to write.)

Her and her parents are in a hotel, waiting on her father's business meeting to conclude. Her mother goes to bed early, citing a migraine, and her father sighs and leaves the room, headed for a quiet place to smoke.

Susan nods, and dresses up for the night, and goes to the hotel bar.

It takes no time at all for a drink to slide across the tabletop at her - a sparkling glass of tonic water, with a heavy measure of gin. The man serving nods across the room, at a group of boys in modern white shirts and cigarette packets in their pockets and loud laughter, and the tallest and thinnest of these boys catches her eye and winks.

Susan nods again, to him and to herself, and when she takes a sip her lipstick makes an imprint on the rim of the glass. Another boy laughs, and the one who's caught her eye doesn't notice.

 

She comes home from America changed - all the Pevensie siblings reunite changed, in various different ways. They leave their parents in the kitchen, as they did even before they were old, and run down down the garden path to an overgrown bush, crouching like generals plotting war.

They were, once upon a time.

Peter is growing a beard, although its an absent-minded sort of one. He blinks slowly, and talks slowly too, and Susan can tell there's been little conversation at Kirke's cottage all summer. Medieval warfare is all well and good, and apparently his dissertation has been incredibly well received, all his tutors marvelling at the way he really got into the _mindset_ of the besieged army. Peter tells his story like he knows it isn't exciting. He tells it like he knows he's been usurped.

"Kirke's a good old soul," he says. He doesn't fidget; he never did, not when he was young, and not when he was old, in the years that don't exist beyond them. "I think he knew, or suspected, what we did in that summer, but the old man wouldn't ever dream of asking me outright. I hinted, and he hinted, and the pair of us went around in circles almost mentioning... you know, _him,_ until I came home."

Lucy and Edmund are almost bursting with their news, but all the same they look to Susan first. Age descending.

"Nothing happened to me in America," she says, "Nothing you lot want to know."

"Oh, _Susan,"_ Lucy explodes in a babble of excitement, talking about Aslan and sea journeys and little men with only one foot and doves and Eustace and dragons and moral lessons and Caspian and lambs and mermaids and Edmund nods along, excited brother, and -

And all three of them have forgotten what Susan won't.

Aslan isn't letting them back in. For some reason, for some _reason,_ he's decided they aren't good enough any more. Their time is up.

Peter's found his solace in Oxford, in libraries and books and discussion, and Lucy and Edmund will have no difficulty finding exactly where they belong.

Aslan promised it all to Susan, and he didn't tell her that it was conditional, and in some way she's slipped up. She'll never forgive him.

 

She's in America again, when she gets the news about the train crash.

She reads the telegram naked, in bed with Paul, a Canadian man in New York for business, much like herself. He's sleeping, and she's smoking, and the letter is pushed under her door, and she's reading the letters through a veil of unreality, reading but not understanding.

Seeing is not believing.

Fuck that bastard. She has to identify the bodies, the telegram tells her, as cold and inhuman as the train that killed them, and she's needed immediately in England, and so she gets out of bed and dresses in yesterday's clothes and leaves a note for Paul before checking out of the hotel. Her hands don't shake.

When she dreams on the boat over, if she dreams at all, she sees a lion. The lion tells her she should have paid more attention to things that matter.

 _Who are you to tell me what matters?_ She asks it - it, not him, never him - and there's a cigarette in her hand, and when she smokes it the end is pink with lipstick. She wakes up crying.

And the bodies are difficult to identify - Peter isn't, because he was protected from the worst of it, and just got a fatal bash to the head, but the younger two are all but torn to shreds. Susan has to take a break to vomit into a toilet, and a kindly old woman pats her on the back, and all she can do is cry and hate herself and hate _him_ for making her feel like she has to.

Her parents, they say, are unidentifiable. They were on board, and they haven't turned up alive, so they're forced to draw the conclusions...

Susan arranges the funerals herself, and they're buried in the family plot. Five names. _Loving father, loving mother, loving son, loving son, loving daughter._ She sees a ginger cat skulking around the bottom of the graveyard, near a copse of trees, and it takes all the effort in every bone in her body not to throw gravel at it until it leaves her alone.

No justice. Not from him. She shouldn't have expected it, and she won't any further, because a god that does this is a god she doesn't believe in.

She doesn't go to church.

 

Time passes.

Susan learns to cope, and she grows into the woman she's already become once before, in a time that's never happened. Scars on her body that arrived in battle aren't there, and it feels strange sometimes, looking at herself in the mirror and seeing thirty years and counting almost seventy all-lived, looking at herself and seeing plain skin where there should be battle wounds, seeing scars where there should be plain skin. No wedding band, yet, nor likely to ever be. Susan keeps herself to herself, and the men she takes home are all shadows, coming in the dark and leaving then too.

The sun rises, and she does, and she smokes alone and drinks too much coffee. She needs to cut down, the doctors say, or she's en-route to an early heart attack, an old age riddled with problems.

She agrees, and goes home and makes a pot of coffee. The ginger cat from next door keeps hanging around.

"You've done enough," she tells it, wearily. "I get the point. Don't rub it in."

Aslan says she's not good enough, and Susan is determined to prove him wrong. She writes a book, and dedicates it to Peter, who would have written one three times as good and not half so popular. With the money, she buys an old house in the English countryside.

It's just as she remembers it, of course, but smaller. When she was young it seemed stiflingly big.

The old wardrobe is just that - an old wardrobe, still full of coats, four more familiar than the rest. One she recognises as hers. It smells of mothballs and disuse.

When her fingertips brush the wooden back, the shallow back, she scoffs and she doesn't think about how lonely she is in this big old house. She carries it out, all on her own, because nobody else is left to help her and she wouldn't let them in any case, and she lights a match - first to set her cigarette aglow, and then to drop.

It makes such a merry sight, as to make an old woman's heart warm. The carved lion's face cracks and blackens, and she tells it good riddance, and she means it with all the strength she's ever had.

**Author's Note:**

> my twitter is @sweetlyblue if u wanna talk about books there i am v willing


End file.
